Islam & Discov. of Freedom

Product Description

Islam and the Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane with an Introduction and Commentary by Dr. Imad Dean Ahmed Provides scriptural and historical documentation to a leading American liberatarian writers brilliant insight into the role of the classical Islamic civilization in establishing liberty and human rights. This highly readable book is a must-have for anyone interested in what Islam teaches about political, social and economic order. Non-Muslims will be astonished at the contrast between the classical Islamic society and the image of the Muslim world today. Muslim parents will especially want their high school and college-aged children to read about their heritage and its implications for the modern world. This book squarely confronts the question of what made the classical Islamic society so dynamic and productive and the role it played in the rise of modern values in the West. Rose Wilder Lane Born in 1886, the daughter of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder (of Little House on the Prairie fame), Rose Wilder Lane was a biographer and best selling novelist. She encouraged her mother to write the best selling Little House series about her childhood. Above all Lane was a powerful polemicist voicing the call for human liberty. Wide recognition of her talents on that score began with her 1936 Saturday Evening Post Article, Credo. She also knew something about Islam, having worked for the Red Cross after the First World War documenting their activities in the Balkans, Russia and the Middle East. Perhaps from that experience she gathered the insights that found their way into her chapter on the role played by Islam in establishing human liberty in her book The Discovery of Freedom: Mans Struggle Against Authority. Although Mrs. Lane withdrew publication of The Discovery of Freedom because of her dissatisfaction with historical errors in a book which claims to have written in a white heat, this annotations and commentary in this present volume demonstrate the truth of Albert Jay Nocks observation: When it comes to anything fundamental, Mrs. Lane never makes a mistake. She is always right. Dr. Imad A. (Dean) Ahmad A cum laude graduate of Harvard with a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Arizona, Imad-ed-Dean Ahmad is now President of the Minaret of Freedom Institute, an Islamic free-market think tank in the Washington, DC area. An adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins Universitys school for Advanced International Studies and at the University of Maryland, he teaches an honors course on Religion and Progress: Islamic Science, Politics, and Economics. Since the mid-1980s, Dr. Ahmad has worked primarily in the area of Islamic studies, building on his lifetime interest in religion and politics. An international lecturer on Islamic matters, Dr. Ahmads first book, Signs in the Heavens A Muslim Astronomers Perspective on Religion and Science was published in 1992. He presented a talk on this subject at the 1994 Vatican Conference on the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena on World Culture sponsored by the Vatican Observatory. He is co- editing Islam and the West: a Dialog, scheduled for publication by the end of 1997.